Consider that, today, more than 70% of Americans use social media—up from only 5% tallied in 2005, according to the Pew Research Center. A handful of key players in the space continue to rule. Social Media Examiner's "2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report" revealed that the top platforms used by marketers are Facebook (94%), Twitter (68%), LinkedIn (56%), Instagram (54%), YouTube (45%), Pinterest (30%), and Snapchat (7%). So what's in stor for 2018?

CampaignChain Secures Angel Backing

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CampaignChain, a digital marketing platform, launched in private beta for a limited time. This new open source-based software is not a specific niche marketing software, but rather an uber-aggregation of all online channels and tools for end-to-end digital marketing campaign management.

The startup is backed by angel investors YMC, an IT solutions provider with clients such as ProSiebenSat.1 Medien AG, Migros, Roche, and two open source entrepreneurs, Bryan Bogensberger (former CEO, Inktank) and David Gillard, COO of Pydio. Mike Grossman, CEO of Zetta and formerly of SugarSync, serves in an advisory capacity.

With CampaignChain, instead of replacing all existing best-of-breed marketing tools, customers can keep their existing communications infrastructure intact and use CampaignChain to integrate all tools and gradually add upcoming ones. For example, users can plan marketing campaigns across multiple online channels. Create, move and edit campaigns, milestones, and activities by dragging and dropping them right inside a timeline or calendar view. Marketing activities can be scheduled in advance and will be executed automatically. That means users can schedule newsletters, website updates, and tweets to be posted at a specific time. Plus, statistics will be collected automatically from a channel, such as the number of Likes for a Facebook post.